Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  At 6.30 that evening the Yongala was sighted battling mountainous seas and gale-force winds at the northern end of the Whitsunday Passage. Later that night or during the early hours of the next morning the Yongala sank with the loss of all on board.

  Mailbags and wreckage (including the body of the racehorse) came ashore south of Townsville but the wreck was not located and identified until 1958, twenty-three kilometres east of Cape Bowling Green. In 1981 the Yongala was declared an historic wreck under the Commonwealth Shipwrecks Act. And so the official file closed on one of Queensland’s worst shipping disasters, but long before then the ill-fated Yongala had entered the ghost lore of the sea.

  In 1923 a party of local fishermen from Bowen were trying their luck in a small boat off tiny Holbourne Island (near the main shipping channel the Yongala would have used) when a large ship hove into view from the south. The fishermen had seen the ship before and they all recognised her — it was the Yongala, steaming steadily by in the bright sunshine twelve years after her sinking.

  The steamship’s sleek blue-and-red hull was now encrusted with millions of barnacles, the white-painted superstructure was rusted and draped with seaweed and the ship’s once-proud funnel was twisted and stoved in. Of crew or passengers there was no sign. The bridge appeared unattended, but as the ship seemed to be bearing on a definite course, the watchers speculated that unseen hands must have been guiding it. Wisps of smoke also trailed from the broken funnel, signalling the presence of phantom stokers toiling below decks.

  The small boat bobbed dangerously in the swell caused by the larger vessel and the fishermen abandoned their fishing to watch the spectacle in amazement. Any doubts that it was a phantom ship they were observing were dispelled when the Yongala disappeared behind the southern tip of Holbourne Island then failed to reappear at the northern end. The fishermen raised anchor and sailed around the island, but could find no trace of any other vessel. The phantom ship had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

  Until the discovery of the wreck of the Yongala ninety kilometres further north in 1958, many believed the ghost ship had appeared to the fishermen to indicate that it lay off Holbourne Island. Today its location is beyond dispute; and if any of those fishermen were still around they would swear that their sighting of it was equally indisputable.

  There are two interesting postscripts to this story. A Mrs Lowther, who lived in Mackay until 1969, recounted her own strange experience at the time of the wreck. She was booked to sail on the Yongala on its final voyage but at the last moment had a premonition of disaster and, although she was halfway out to the ship on a tender, refused to go aboard and demanded to be taken back to shore.

  That same fateful night a family staying in a hotel at Eton, west of Mackay, also had a vision of the disaster. There was a kerosene lamp on the table in their room and suddenly one of the children pointed to it and said ‘Look at the big ship!’ The flame had blackened a portion of the glass creating the clear image of a large ship riding a mountainous sea. As the fascinated family watched, the picture faded and was replaced by another — the distressed face of a girl.

  The next day news of the Yongala’s disappearance broke and, while the father was walking down a Mackay street he saw a poster for a touring theatrical company with the face of the young girl on it. He later learned that she had been among the unlucky passengers on the Yongala.

  Prior to its sinking the S.S. Yongala had a long and proud history, but not so the ship that started life as the George M. Shriver and ended up as the Alkimos.

  Any sailor will tell you some ships are jinxed, destined to an inglorious history of mishap and tragedy from the day they are launched. The George M. Shriver was such a ship. Built in the Kayser Shipyards in Baltimore in 1943, the 7300-tonne oil-powered freighter was one of the thousands, hastily assembled in American shipyards and called Liberty Ships, which ran the gauntlet of German U-boats in the Atlantic and carried much-needed supplies to worn-torn Britain.

  The Kayser Shipyard prided itself on the speed with which it assembled hulls; ten days was the average. The George M. Shriver took six weeks. Its prefabricated sections didn’t fit, equipment broke down and there were numerous accidents among the workers, who struggled to complete their task and rid their slipway of what was already being called a jinxed ship.

  The George M. Shriver’s World War Two service record was largely undistinguished and it was in dry-dock more often than at sea. In 1943 the ship was sold to a Norwegian company and given a new name, Viggo Hansteen, but if it was hoped the change of name would bring a change of luck, that hope was never realised. In the years after the war when it passed into private hands, the ship was involved in all sorts of mishaps and needed constant repairs. In 1961, for example, it collided with another vessel in Bristol harbour and was out of service for eleven months while its bow and its superstructure were rebuilt. After that the Norwegian owners decided they had had enough of the costly ship and sold it to a Greek company who renamed it Alkimos, the name it carries to this day.

  In March 1963 while en route from Jakarta to Bunbury in Western Australia the Alkimos struck a reef off lonely Beagle Island about 120 kilometres south of Geraldton. Local crayfishermen circled the stricken ship and reported its predicament to the maritime authorities in Perth but, inexplicably, the commander of the Alkimos, Captain Kassotakis, did not request assistance for three days. A tug was eventually sent to try to refloat the freighter but the captain decided the winches on Alkimos were more powerful. For two days the winches ground, the ship writhed and shuddered and moved not a centimetre. A salvage expert who was flown up from Perth flooded the stern of the vessel, raising the bow, and the Alkimos finally refloated.

  Half-filled with seawater and in danger of sinking at any moment, the disabled ship was towed into Fremantle harbour but, if the captain thought his troubles were over, he was wrong. Repairs began immediately but, in May, a mysterious fire almost gutted the ship. The chief officer was fined 100 pounds for misleading an official inquiry into the grounding, writs for amounts totalling 25,000 pounds were served on the captain for failing to pay for earlier repairs and the ship was impounded. The owners paid up but cancelled plans to repair the battered and charred ship in Australia and engaged a local tug operator to tow it to Hong Kong.

  The tug Pacific Reserve set out on 30 May with the Alkimos secured on a 600-metre towline. The sea was calm at first, but on the second day out an unforecast westerly gale whipped up mountainous seas. Fifty-seven kilometres north of Fremantle and twenty-four kilometres off the coast the towline snapped. The crew of the Pacific Reserve tried desperately to secure another line but the sea was too rough. The Alkimos began to drift helplessly towards the coast. For the second time in three months the ill-fated freighter ploughed into treacherous reefs and the boiling surf impaled it on Eglinton Rocks.

  Several attempts to salvage the vessel were made but all ended in failure and the Alkimos’s jinx touched every one of them. Tugs were damaged, lines snapped, equipment failed, accidents and illness plagued the salvage crews and the crippled ship stayed wedged in rock and sand. Salvage attempts were abandoned when the winter storm season arrived, then in December a team from Manila arrived to try their luck, but the boilers on their tug, the Pacific Star, suddenly and unexpectedly showed signs of bursting and the owner of the company collapsed and died.

  The help of a Roman Catholic priest was sought to dispel the jinx and it seemed for a time that his intervention had worked when a heavy swell lifted the crippled vessel and it miraculously floated. The Pacific Star, with its boilers repaired, took the Alkimos in tow but, a couple of kilometres from Eglinton Rocks, another vessel pulled alongside, arrested the tug’s captain for unpaid debts in Manila and impounded his boat. Unable to give further aid to the Alkimos, the crew of the Pacific Star anchored the rusting freighter between the reefs off Eglinton Rocks but, true to form, it snapped its anchor chain in a heavy swell and drifted shorewards. The Alkimos finally came to rest
about four kilometres south of Yanchep Beach, where it lies to this day, split apart, covered in barnacles, a home to fish and a very active, sinister ghost.

  Two crew members from the Pacific Star were stationed on the Alkimos to guard the wreck. For the two men it promised to be a few weeks of light duties and relaxation at their company’s expense while the legal wrangle over the Pacific Star was sorted out, but it turned out to be a living nightmare. After a day or two the men sensed they were not alone on the vessel. Tools left in one place would be found in another, a heavy hose they tried to move suddenly felt lighter as though another pair of hands was sharing the load. Strange smells of food cooking came wafting up from the disused galley and the sounds of pots and pans banging could be heard, but when they went to investigate the smells and sounds were gone. Finally, on a hot evening when the two men were on deck trying to catch the slight breeze that rose at sunset, they saw their fellow ‘passenger’: a giant of a man dressed in an oilskin coat and a sou’wester, who strode across the main deck then straight through a closed steel door.

  The two Filipinos were replaced by other caretakers, all of whom had stories to tell about their encounters with the ghost. One pair claimed that it came charging towards them in a narrow gangway one day and that they felt the power of its baleful stare as it thrust them aside, knocking one unconscious. Another of the Filipino caretakers claimed that the ghost threw a kettle of boiling water at him.

  No one had any idea who the ghost was and so, for want of a real one, he was given the name ‘Henry’. A young American exchange student spent six days on board the Alkimos in July 1963 and recorded in his diary that he was stalked by terrifying footsteps the whole time and the door of the captain’s cabin was slammed shut behind him by unseen hands. Sightseers and fishermen claimed to have seen Henry at night and in broad daylight moving about the decks of the ship in his oilskins and sou’wester. Local tour operators cashed in on the stories by organising ghost tours of the wreck; and a Dutch clairvoyant visited the ship. She spent half a day on board and reported the area beneath the foremast was ‘a very evil place’ where she believed someone had met a violent death.

  A local identity, the late Jack Sue OAM, highly decorated by the US and Australian governments for his work with Z Force behind enemy lines during World War Two, was sceptical about the stories of the ghost and organised a party to spend a night aboard the Alkimos. The party comprised Jack, his wife and some local divers. Jack’s scepticism was shattered when he heard footsteps, sneezing and coughing coming from a deserted section of the ship and one of the divers felt something brush past him. Moments later ‘Henry’ put in an appearance and, as the party watched in disbelief, the ghost strode purposefully across the deck and straight through a solid bulkhead.

  The jinx on the Alkimos continued to reach out and touch the lives of all who came in contact with it. The pregnant wife of one caretaker slipped and fell on board and lost her baby. Two business partners, John Franetovich and Bob Hugal, bought the wreck for scrap but bad luck dogged them from that day: a tanker they owned collided with another ship and had to be scuttled; and Hugal, who until then had enjoyed perfect health, suddenly became seriously ill. Swimmers near the wreck were caught in currents that had not been there moments before, visitors to the wreck suffered injuries and motor vessels sailing near the wreck experienced engine troubles. Jack Sue became seriously ill soon after spending the night on the Alkimos and his wife died, tragically, in a car accident. One of the divers died suddenly and the fiancée of another was killed in a plane crash. The skull of a long-distance swimmer who had gone missing while trying to swim from the mainland to Rottnest Island was found in the hull of the Alkimos and identified by dental records.

  One morning observers noticed smoke coming from the funnel of the hulk. It looked, they said, as though the old ship was preparing to sail away under its own power. Two newspaper reporters went on board to investigate and found that drums of tar stored in the ship had mysteriously ignited. This was just one of six unexplained fires on board.

  Another party determined to lay the stories of the ghost set out to spend a weekend on the wreck. Their Land Rover broke down, the motor on their boat would not start and, when they finally put to sea, a single, huge wave that seemed to come from nowhere swamped their boat and soaked their expensive photographic equipment. Despite calm waters around the wreck the party’s boat would not stay alongside. A line was tied securely to the Alkimos but mysteriously came undone. When they finally scrambled aboard in darkness none of their torches would work. They tried to set up camp on the solid bow area of the ship but their spirit stove blew up and, despite predictions of fine weather, heavy rain began to fall at around 2 am. As they huddled together in the rain, wishing they had never embarked on the expedition, they heard the incongruous sound of a dog yapping. The sound seemed to come from the stern of the ship but no dog could be seen. Despite being stressed out by their recent experiences, concern that an animal might be trapped or injured on the wreck set them searching, but each time they approached the source of the sound it retreated. No dog — or any other animal — was found, but the yapping continued through most of the night. (Strangely, the captain’s logbook recorded the mysterious yapping of a dog in the engine room and other parts of the ship when the Alkimos was en route across the Atlantic during World War Two, a quarter of a century before.)

  In an effort to find the truth, Jack Sue was persuaded to return to the ship with technicians from a television station, who set up cameras and recording equipment in the hope of catching ‘Henry’ on film or tape. Jack dossed down on an old steel bunk in one of the disused cabins, but was awakened during the night by strange noises. As his ears tuned to the sounds, he recognised heartrending groans (the sound one might expect from a person in agony), which seemed to be coming from the bunk next to his. Jack reached for his torch and snapped it on. The bright beam revealed that the bunk beside his was empty and when he shone the torch around the cabin there was nothing to be seen. Everything was in place and apparently undisturbed — but the terrible groans continued for several minutes more.

  Jack admitted to being deeply affected by the sounds and not a little frightened on both his expeditions to the Alkimos; and as anyone who had the privilege of knowing Jack Sue would testify, he was not a man to imagine or exaggerate anything. And, after his wartime experiences, it took a lot to frighten him.

  One of the technicians who went with Jack reported catching a brief glimpse of a strange, dark figure that disappeared into the salty night air. The recording equipment they used captured eerie rumbling sounds like distant drums or gunfire and a series of blood-curdling shrieks followed by coughing and heavy breathing, none of which was heard by the men on board.

  Around 1991 in a heavy sea the bow of the Alkimos broke off and the twisted and torn wreck slowly began to disintegrate, disappearing from sight in recent years. To this day people stare out across the sea to where the two jagged halves of the hulk once towered above the water, recalling its grim history. Fishermen circle round the spot swapping stories and divers occasionally explore what remains on the sea floor in the hope of catching a glimpse of ‘Henry’. But the hundreds whose lives have been affected by the jinx know better and vow never again to go near the ill-fated Alkimos.

  4.

  Till Death Us Do Part

  So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss

  Which sucks two souls and vapours both away,

  Turn thou ghost that way and let me turn this.

  The Expiration, John Donne (English poet, 1572–1631)

  When personal relationships turn sour (or are soured by a third party), fertile ground for gruesome ghost stories is created. Here are two disturbing stories and one amusing story that prove that point. The first tells of a marital mismatch that resulted in both parties being condemned to haunt their former home. The second and third both tell of how obnoxious relatives wreaked havoc on other couples’ relationships before and beyond t
he grave. All three stories have something else in common. They all originate from one of Australia’s great wine-growing regions.

  Commencing in the 1830s shiploads of Lutheran refugees from Germany migrated to South Australia and settled in the Barossa Valley. They modelled their settlements on the villages of their homeland, planted the hillsides with grapevines and established a wine-growing industry that flourishes to this day. They were dour and pious people with a culture, rooted in the Middle Ages, that acknowledged the powers of both light and darkness. For them, witches, goblins and sprites infested the hills of the Barossa region as surely as they did the Black Forest; and the devil incarnate was a real threat to their lives and souls. Ghost stories abound in this beautiful part of Australia and perhaps the strangest and most compelling of all concerns a vineyard near the tiny village of Bethany.

  One day in the middle of the nineteenth century a knife grinder came to the vineyard to ply his trade. The property belonged to a young spinster whose parents had died of dysentery when she was a child; since then she had been raised by Quakers. The young woman was endowed with property, good health and pleasant features. The only thing she lacked was a husband. The knife grinder was a personable young man more than content to pass the time of day with the young woman, especially when he learned that she was the sole owner of the neat cottage, all the livestock and the flourishing vineyard that stretched as far as the eye could see. A match was made; the spinster became a bride and the knife grinder became a prosperous farmer.

  Soon after their marriage the husband discovered a side to his wife’s character he had not reckoned on. Some nights she would disappear from their cottage without explanation. When she returned the next morning no amount of cajoling or threatening would make her reveal where she had been. At first he thought she was being unfaithful to him with another man in the village, but then strange rumours began to reach his ears. His wife, it was said, had rebelled against the strict teachings of the Quakers when still a child and had become a devotee of an elder who secretly practised the black arts. Now, rumour-mongers claimed, she regularly travelled in the company of twelve other women to the top of Kaiser Stuhl Mountain to perform witches’ rites and dance naked under the full moon.